If you are a business looking to reach out to 100s of customers on WhatsApp to inform them about new products and offers, you might have struggled to do so till now, due to WhatsApp’s Template guidelines. But not anymore!
On interakt, you can now create personalized WhatsApp Templates with non-transactional content as well (for example – templates containing new product announcements / discount offers / product back in stock alerts etc.), which you can send out to 100s of customers from your WhatsApp API number! If you haven’t yet shifted to interakt for connecting with customers on WhatsApp, you can do so from here! Set up your WhatsApp API Business Account via interakt and start sending Whatsapp promotional notifications to your customers in bulk!
What exactly is changing in Whatsapp API Templates?
One of the benefits of using a WhatsApp API Business Account on Interakt has been that you don’t face the constraints of the normal WhatsApp app for sending out bulk messages. As opposed to the normal WhatsApp app, your customer needn’t have your number saved for receiving bulk and personalized WhatsApp notifications from you.
However, till now, WhatsApp allowed such bulk messaging only with templates which are transactional in nature (for example – confirming a customer’s order / updating order’s shipment status to the customer etc.). If you wanted to send out a personalized template having discount offers / product back in stock alerts etc., WhatsApp would reject that template. With this development, such templates won’t get rejected anymore!
How can your business use Non-Transactional WhatsApp Templates?
So just head over to Interakt’s Whatsapp Templates page and start creating templates with non-transactional content! Then use those templates in Onetime or Ongoing Whatsapp Notifications to send out to customers. There are so many use cases for which you might need a promotional template:
• Timely Discount offers
• Product back in stock alerts
• Reviving an inactive customer
• Announcing a new product
• Upselling to an existing customer
Example of Non-Transactional Templates you can send out:
How will Interakt help your business increase sales via WhatsApp marketing?
As a business looking to convert more prospects into paying customers, or re-engaging existing customers to drive higher revenues, you would want to touch base with the customer at multiple points in the customer’s journey with your business.
• As per a research by WhatsApp, 75% of adults want to message with businesses the same way they do with people. Hence, there is no better place for you to touch base with your customer than a platform where you can converse with your customer – WhatsApp!
• Moreover, it is an established fact that read and reply rates on WhatsApp can be 5 times higher than other channels like emails / SMSs / push notifications etc.
• Hence, if you want to send out an offer to a visitor on your e-commerce website to make him carry out his first purchase, there is no better place to do so than his WhatsApp inbox. Or, if you wanted to revive a dormant customer of yours by sending him product recommendations based on his past purchases, you would want to send that recommendation in his WhatsApp inbox.
• In fact, some experiments where businesses sent out non-transactional templates to customers yielded results like the following:
– While email struggles with a 20-23% open rate, WhatsApp for marketing agencies soars with a skyrocketing 98%.
– 37x more conversions compared to SMSes for a food delivery platform
– 2.5x more conversions compared to push notifications for a food delivery platform
– 3x higher response rate compared to emails for an Interior Design Platform
Hence one can expect such non-transactional WhatsApp campaigns to have a significant direct impact on increasing revenues for businesses!
What are some of the important caveats to keep in mind while using non-transactional templates?
• Businesses must collect WhatsApp Business opt-ins from customers before sending such non-transactional templates to them. Hence, your customers must be expecting to receive these messages.
• The messages should be personalized in nature, should contain valuable information and should outline clear call to action(s) for the customer.
• You should send out these messages to customers at a logical time (ex: soon after the customer has engaged with your business, or at a time when the customer is expecting to hear back from you).
• You should provide clear instructions to customers on how they can opt-out from receiving such communications from your business and you should make sure you honors those opt-out requests.
• Keep monitoring your Account Status messaging limit on Interakt (or the Quality Rating of your WABA account on the FB Business Manager). If your non-transactional templates are causing customers to block your number on WhatsApp / report your communications as spam on WhatsApp, it might affect your Account Status / Quality Rating, which might lead to rate limiting or disabling of templates.
